Culture finally caught up with me that I experienced “wordnesia.” For the first time since I started writing for Manila Bulletin, I encountered a blank. Literally. Surprisingly, I never feared the blank page. I am most comfortable with having mental diarrhea on paper. Sometimes, my editor AA Patawaran would send my work back exasperated, prodding me to cut it short. But this this time, it was a blank with only the word culture. I am familiar with this phenomenon because it happened to me before a long time ago with the word, the and and. I knew the word wordnesia existed, but all of a sudden, I found its spelling weird and its meaning convoluted. I had to look it up.

Wordnesia is described as a “brain glitch.” It happens “when familiar words suddenly seem like the strangest things.” According to Baylor University Psychology and neuroscience professor Charles Weaver III, “As the word is used repeatedly, the neural pattern continues to fire. In other words, the brain repeats the same task over and over and, after a while, this reaction becomes less intense. As a result, the parts of your brain that searches for the word’s meaning become inhibited.”

This is what happened to me with the word Culture. I was disconcerted. Concerned, until I read up a little bit about this phenomenon. First step, I searched for the name of this phenomenon and identified it as wordnesia. After reassuring myself that it does happen and what can be done, the next was to look for the definition of culture and reacquaint myself with the concept, just to make sure things are clear to me again. Whew!

From what I read, wordnesia can be “result from a heightened focus on a certain word or words as we are reading or writing them and when one thinks specifically about the word, one loses the ability to process the word as a whole unit.” It is also brought about by fatigue. And no wonder! After all, I have spent the last years since the lifting of the Covid lockdown being project editor of my late uncle Ferdinand E. Marcos’ book (some volumes unpublished) Tadhana: The History of the Filipino People, sifting through his written and still unpublished manuscripts, compiling his speeches, photographs, audio reels, and slides, annotating them, documenting his administration’s work, as well as the work of his wife former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos from 1969 to 1986, not to mention having to churn out weekly articles for this space in the Manila Bulletin! I can safely say I have overloaded myself in culture these past years.

Just to clarify what I mean by culture, I will use the definition found in the Dictionary of Concepts in Archaeology by Molly Raymond Mignon, a book I immediately pulled out of my shelf to remind myself.

This is how Mignon defines culture.

1. The sum of human knowledge and adaptive skills that have enabled the human species to survive and expand into all world environments.

2. The set of particular adaptive skills and strategies acquired by a human population, and transmitted through learning from one generation to the next within that group.

3. In archaeology, the total non-genetically transmitted adaptive pattern acquired and perpetuated through time by a human group, which will include not only the economic and technological adaptive systems reflected in its material remains, by also the social and ideological systems developed as part of its overall adaptation.”

It was with much relief that my idea of culture is not in conflict with the definitions above. To give my glitching brain time to recoup, I decided to go for a walk.

Most of us are aware of the benefits of walking on our mental and physical health. They have been very well documented. But I came across an interesting article on walking, “Walking, Places, and Wellbeing” by Dick Ettema and Ifeta Smajic. They focused their research on the “wellbeing effects of walking and whether environment plays a role in the walking experience. Is it better to walk in crowded areas where there are many activities happening or to walk in quieter places?

Ettema and Smajic measured the wellbeing of pedestrians during their respective walking trips and found that “happiness is highest in places with many activities going on like cafés, restaurants, shops, and traffic with many people around them.” When it came to places with “lower activities” or areas with trees and water and even buildings with “a more contemplative character,” a restorative feeling of wellness was fostered. The study concluded that not only can we benefit physically from our walks, we can also enhance the experience to make it contribute to and impact more positively on our mental and emotional wellbeing, depending on where we walk.